I’m taking a wee break from writing Jelly’s Adventure, and back to my super serious medical game making.

ForFeb FataleI’m working on a resource management menstruation game. It’s called Don’t Bleed Through Your Pants. I’ve been working on the groundwork for this one for while, but I’m finally doing the base coding and assets.

I choose to use game maker instead of construct 2. I wanted to make a game that can be played in a browser. I went with game maker because there is a little more options for writing code rather than using a visual language. My mind seems to be leaning towards code more these days.

I’m going to make several different modes as periods are wildly different. Sometimes it’s not about quantity of blood, but how an unpredictable cycle can ninja you.

Resources that need to managed are your ‘shields’ aka all the stuff to protect your pants. In what I’ve temporarily called “Diana’s nightmare 8 month geyser of blood” you’ll have manage your anemia.

Is this Uterus scary enough?

You’ll have to manage your distance from a toilet/waste paper basket. Part of the motivation is I want people to get the idea that some periods basically trap you in a radius of a bathroom. You can’t watch an entire movie or sleep, because you have to change your products. Other’s can basically surprise you when you least expect it, and it might be a relief that you got because “whewww I’m not pregnant.” Other periods can be so painful, that you simply cannot function.

Changing products too much or too little results in discomfort. I can say I’ve definitely had a sandpaper tampon cut my insides like Captain Crunch cuts your mouth. Different products have different levels of protection, and some can be used in combination.

Right now, it’s about getting the basic framework set and then releasing the more complex version in May 2017.

I did get a bit of a head start. Makes me feel a bit like a cheater, but I’m missing most of the jam tomorrow because I’ll be in my car.

Also, I wanted to show that sometimes it’s not ‘just you.’ That people with periods aren’t whiny, or over reacting, but there might actually something wrong if you are limited by your period. My blood geyser was a lovely mix of fibroids and a probably a bleeding disorder called Von Willebrands (I say probably, because the hematologist suggested that it might be a cause, but also never tested me for it.) The problem is that we shame periods so much, that a lot of people don’t get help, or are often refused help because they are told “it’s just your period.” I was told to get pregnant for years, because creating a human is a very sensible solution to controlling flow. (That was sarcasm.)

Here I go, trying to teach people about how managing menstruation isn’t easy.